BEIRUT: Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a rare public appearance, welcomed five Lebanese freed from captivity in Israel yesterday after his guerrilla group returned the bodies of two captured Israeli soldiers.

Nasrallah, whose movements are kept secret for security reasons, embraced the ex-prisoners at a rally in Beirut. "The period of defeat is over and the time of victory has arrived," Nasrallah said. "This people, this nation and this country, which gave a clear image today, cannot be defea
ted," he told the crowd before leaving to deliver a speech by video link from a secure location.

A grim mood prevailed in Israel, where the prisoner swap was widely seen as a painful necessity two years after the capture of the two Israeli army reservists sparked a 34-day war in which about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis were killed. Among the released captives was Samir Kantar, who had been Israel's longest-serving Lebanese prisoner and whom Israelis revile for his part in a 1979 Palestinian guerrilla attack.

The International Committee of the Red Cross brought the men to the border town of Naqoura. Wearing military fatigues, they marched down a red carpet flanked by a Hezbollah honour guard. Two Lebanese army helicopters then flew the men to Beirut, where President Michel Suleiman, Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri kissed them at the airport.

The five - Kantar and Hezbollah fighters Khaled Zidan, Maher Kurani, Mohammed Sarur and Hussein Suleiman - stood on a platform as Suleiman spoke and then shook hands with the politicians lined up to greet them. "Your return is a new victory and the future in your presence will be a path in which we will realise the sovereignty of our territory and the liberty of our people," Suleiman said. "I tell Samir and his companions that they have a right to be proud of their country, their army and their resistance.


Kantar kissed his mother, Siham Kantar, 71, after the meet and greet with the politicians as crowds and the media swarmed around him. His mother had burst into tears while waiting earlier at the airport when she was told that her son had arrived in Naqura and was indeed free after more than 28 years in jail. "I never gave up hope for a day," she said, choked by emotion. "This moment makes up for 30 years of waiting. I want to hug and kiss him. My only wish is to see him." "This new victory completes the vi
ctory of the July war," Kantar told Hezbollah television.

Kantar told the cheering crowds in Beirut later he thanked God for giving him the strength to endure his almost three-decade imprisonment, which made him the longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel. "Thank God we arrived to this day; this day of victory, never to return to a day of defeat. Thank God who gave me strength... and who always gave me hope in the moments of weaknesses," Kantar said. "Thank God who gave me the ability to endure, challenge and face imprisonment. Thank God (who) resurrected in this
country a resistance, this great Islamic resistance," he added.

Israel retrieved the corpses of the two soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, only after agreeing to release Kantar, who had been serving a life term for the deaths of four Israelis, including a 4-year-old girl and her father. "Woe betide the people who celebrate the release of a beastly man who bludgeoned the skull of a 4-year-old toddler," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement before a private meeting with the families of the soldiers.

As fireworks lit the night sky, tens of thousands of people waving yellow Hezbollah flags gathered in Beirut for the rally to celebrate the release of Qantar and four Hezbollah fighters. Crowds threw rice and mobbed the cars carrying the men to the rally in the southern suburbs, a stronghold of Hezbollah. The ex-captives waved Hezbollah and Lebanese flags at the crowds before Nasrallah's brief appearance sent them wild.

The Shiite group, which is backed by Iran and Syria, earlier handed over the Israeli soldiers in two black coffins. The Israeli army said forensic teams had identified the bodies as those of its missing men. Hezbollah had never disclosed whether they were alive or dead, but Israeli officials had said they were badly wounded at the time of their capture.

The release of the Lebanese prisoners, said by Hezbollah to be the last held in Israel, closed a file that has motivated repeated attempts by Shiite guerrillas over the past quarter of a century to capture Israelis to use as bargaining counters. The fathers of the two Israeli soldiers spoke of their pain at watching the transfer of their sons' coffins on television. "It is not easy to see this, although there was not much surprise to it. But ... confronting this reality was difficult, yes," Shlomo Goldwass
er told Israel radio. Zvi Regev said on Army Radio: "It was a terrible thing to see, really terrible. I was always optimistic, and I hoped all the time that I would meet Eldad and hug him.

Goldwasser's family broke down in cries of despair when they saw the footage of Hezbollah handing over the caskets, while neighbours gathered around the Regev home, lighting candles and quietly shedding tears. "Eldad! Eldad! What have they done to you?" wailed Regev's aunt Hana.

Under the deal arranged by a UN-appointed German mediator, Israel also returned the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters slain in the 2006 war and those of four Palestinians, including Dalal Mughrabi, a woman guerrilla who led a 1978 raid on Israel. The four were among nearly 200 Arabs killed trying to attack Israel, whose bodies were delivered to Lebanon in ICRC trucks as part of the delicately orchestrated swap. Hezbollah returned the remains of other Israeli troops killed in the south.

Israel will also free scores of Palestinian prisoners at a later date as a gesture to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Hezbollah has dubbed the exchange "Operation Radwan", in honour of "Hajj Radwan", or Imad Mughniyah, the group's military commander assassinated in Syria in February. Yellow Hezbollah flags fluttered across south Lebanon and on the coastal highway from Naqoura to Beirut. "Liberation of the captives: a new dawn for Lebanon and Palestine," a banner read.

For some Lebanese, the swap showed the futility of the conflict with Israel two summers ago. "There shouldn't have been a war in 2006. A lot of lives were lost," said Rami Nasereddine, 18, lamenting Israel's refusal to trade captives at the time. The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said the Hezbollah deal strengthened its own hand in demanding freedom for hundreds of prisoners in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. -- Agencies